Excuse me … do you work here?

I´ve been busy since my return home – Diva had her 13^th birthday, so I´m now officially the mother of a teenager. Among other things, she received a bottle of Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue, per her request. It was also our wedding anniversary, and I decided the Big Cheese needed a summer scent, since he´s got a heavy hand with the application and his old-school D&G Pour Homme was rapidly losing its charm in the summer heat.

For a change I took a Group Selection approach with that one, using Gail (my long-suffering SA at Nordstrom) and the random collection of male and female SAs and customers gathered around. I wanted something lighter and summery and maybe more citrus. If Gail worked at Neiman Marcus I´d probably have bought one of the Guerlain colognes like Eau du Coq. But she doesn´t and I owe her, so off to Nordstrom I went. I´d tentatively decided on Asprey Purple Water, if for no other reason than you could spray on half the bottle and live. But its lasting power is, essentially, nil. We smelled several things. I think the new Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue Homme is dreadful. I was curious – what were they going to do with the homme version of such a runaway hit? What I got was very bitter herbal – juniper and rosemary? Ugh, no thanks. They took everything that was great about Light Blue (assuming you thought there was anything great to start with) and sucked all the joy out of it. The Marc Jacobs for men is nice but too floral for the Cheese. (I did try it on myself and the lasting power was mediocre – this coming from someone who clings to scents like a limpet.) Annick Goutal’s Hadrian and Mandragore were out because I wear them and don´t want to smell them on him, and I unilaterally decided he wouldn´t like Duel, although what do I know? I liked the Geir Ness a lot but nobody else did, and maybe its aggressive green note would get on my nerves after awhile, plus I´d already decided to keep it a group experiment, because hey, why not?

So we wound up with the new Gucci Pour Homme II. The packaging is particularly handsome – a heavy, square glass bottle, masculine and expensive-looking. I love the bergamot-tea dynamic, the cinnamon, myrrh and pimento add a nice spicy twist, and for something with all that plus musk and tobacco it´s surprisingly summer-friendly. I don´t think it breaks any wild new ground, scent-wise, but the Cheese isn´t looking for weird, and it´s interesting/sensual without boring me to tears, either. It smells great on him. Everything smells great on him, though.

For Father´s Day maybe I´ll annoy him further (have I mentioned how much my fragrance addiction and the blogging annoy him?) and get him the Geir. He really liked the Weil Eau de Fraicheur last summer (he used the entire bottle) and it´s dirt cheap online, but it´s so generic I just can´t muster the enthusiasm to order him another bottle — I might just as well buy him a bottle of 4711 from our Greek barber up the street. What´s your vote, anyway? (Please – picture a guy who sprays five, six times and isn´t going to change that habit.)

On another topic, I´d like to note that it´s true – I was surrounded by tree-sized rhododendrons all over the UK, and many of them do smell gorgeous, and their azaleas are pretty, too. They don´t go for the garish colors we have here quite so much. The hawthorns were blooming, and wow, you don´t smell that every day, do you? Like buttered feet.

Finally, one of you (who´s the culprit?) talked me into buying an orchid plant online a year or more ago (this orchid´s low maintenance! The blooms smell lovely!) I bought it without much thought, the dull little plant showed up, and it´s been thriving on my special recipe of neglect and tap water ever since, although I have a nice liquid orchid food all mixed up for it, when someone remembers. Frankly, I´d forgotten its existence (this is why my plants are in the yard.) So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I came back from my trip and there it is – with two enormous parti-colored (purple and white) blooms! And the perfume is amazing! I now have it next to my bed so I can smell it scenting the room. Now what? Am I supposed to feed it more? Less? Sing to it? Go back to ignoring it? What about the light? BTW it was supposed to be especially light-friendly – and the tag says l.C. Purple Cascade “Fragrance Princess´ (C. Interglossa x Lc. Tokyo Magic). Stop me before I kill again.

… where were we? Oh. What do I get the Cheese, if anything? I´ll turn bottle #2 into a blog-vote on this post (no, I´m not gonna set up one of those polling things. Puh-lease. Remember who you´re talking to. I´ll count manually.) Or should I get him a case of wine instead? Remember: if it’s for him, it needs to be light.